One thing that COVID has done is create the most interesting bedfellows. People are crossing aisles in all sorts of ways, and I’d like to give credit where it is due to one of the people on the ‘independent’ VRBPAC advisory committee with an actual spine. That would be, surprisingly enough, Dr. Paul Offit.
On Tuesday’s meeting, the committee met to vote on whether they recommended adding an omicron component to the fall boosters. They were also informally asked (they did not vote on it) whether to include the original omicron (BA.1) strain which the various manufacturers did test, at least a little bit, or the BA.4/5 strains. The committee voted that the fall booster should include an omicron component, and so the choice of BA.1 (which was tested) and BA.4/5 (which was not) was left to the FDA itself.
In this clip, Dr. Offit clearly voices his concerns that the data is scant, and that a new product should be treated as a new product. Not only did he clearly voice those concerns, he voted against adding an omicron component at all. Now, does this make him on our side? No, not at all, he’s all for that original strain injection, but he is still a strong voice of reason pushing to slow down and force some actual data out of these manufacturers. And when even Offit for Profit voices hesitancy, you know it’s bad. Also fun to note, he did not participate in the ‘prototype’ verbiage, instead using ‘ancestral’.
Despite his (and others) concerns about the lack of data and the need for clinical trials, on Thursday, Dr. Peter Marks, from the FDA itself determined that they would go with the version the includes BA.4/5 without requiring any new clinical trials for it, the most aggressive version (and most dangerous). You can read some of Dr. Marks’s comments here to see just how off the cliff this extremely powerful man is.
Not everyone at the VRBPAC meeting rolled over